@Oylok,
Quote:However, the unequal distribution of wealth in this country is fanning the flames of our greed. When we raise the stakes that people play for by eliminating safety nets, the old struggle for "ending up the best toys" becomes a bitter struggle for survival. The free-market system is often a good way of harnessing people's greed and directing it towards a good purpose. But when you raise the stakes to the point where the system's losers live out lives of meaningless misery, people will start abusing the system and breaking laws in order to avoid losing. At that point you get rampant white-collar crime like we have today.
Several things need to be addressed here:
First, we worship people who symbolize materialism, whether they are professional athletes or actresses and models "on the red carpet" in clothes we could never afford while we wear jeans and hoodies that are insufficiently warm and result in our failure to "dial down" our thermostats.
Perhaps, this urge to worship conspicuous consumption is not "natural," that is does not spring from within, but is aided and abetted by a news cycle that emphasizes this sort of idolatry at the expense of real news. Is it any wonder that so many right wingers control the media and the media is shrinking, offering less and less variety?
After all, people once read The Saturday Review of Literature and not People.
Second, the conservative notion of the bottom line -- which is not the left's notion of take only what you need so that others might live -- has ruined American education. I have students who come to college with writing skills equivalent to those of Catholic school third - fifth graders of the late 1950s. During my high school career, we were made to read 16 books each year in addition to the in class assignments. Today's kids read one book during the summer and three if they are in honors classes. People whose communications skills are that poor are open to the suggestions of the truly evil in our society, the rush limbaughs and the glenn becks and their puppets, the sarah palins and michele bachmanns.
